Garry R McDougall

Garry McDougall

Trouble! From a sports-crazed childhood, and his first scribblings incinerated by a irate headmaster. High school success meant they couldn't refuse his university entry, where he soon led the Anti-War movement, and initiated sit-ins and subsequent arrests. By burning his ‘draft card' and opposing military conscription, he soon landed in gaol.

Finding travel more fun, on his overland trip from Singapore to Amsterdam, he met Yasser Arafat, lived with gypsies, trekked Nepal, took a life-changing trip in Pakistan, and fell in love with France.

After two years pretending to be a Maths teacher, he studied Art and co-created the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, a long-distance walking track to Newcastle and the Hunter Valley. They refused him an Honour and threw him off the Board when he objected to a cigarette company sponsorship.

After publication of Great North Walk and NSW Heritage Walks, he started a successful business, Great Australian Walks. This fifteen-year stint involved numerous media events, interviews, and TV Travel shows. Exhausted by 2000, he returned to Art, and began writing poetry, short stories and novels.

 After a stint of Adult Ed, Artist-in-Residence and lecturer at the University of Western Sydney, he completed his first novel, Belonging. A second novel, Starts With C, was followed up with a third, Knowing Simone, and a fourth, Blacksmith and Canon. The fifth, A Blacksmith’s Life has been followed by Sea Voices, with a seventh, Renaissance, in the making.

Two inspired travel books Damn! and Border and Soul, plus ten other books on the Spanish, French and Portuguese Caminos de Santiago, make him the pilgrimage path’s most prolific author.

Garry co-initiated the Official Bicentennial Great North Walk, was President of Balmain Institute for seven years, and on the executive of the South Coast Writers Centre. A member of DiVerse (ekphrasis poets) and the Write-On novelist's group, he won the Peter Cowan Short Story Prize with Patting the Dog. He exhibits paintings and photographs, and was Feature Poet at the Sydney Writers Festival, In 2022, he won the Art-In-Unusual-Place Grant.

Practising “Anarchic Rhyme” in all art forms, he masquerades as Hugo Hugo, a 510 yr. old who bemoans his birth as too late for the best of the Renaissance in Sea Voices, though passionate for every age of human folly.

Every so often, he wonders his own follies.

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